Tag: asterdata

From time to time, I revisit the past just to ensure I am not choking on the same spin or hype bullshit I resent in this world of marketing the worlds perfect software (everyone claims to be it, noone is it)

From the very first Big Data conference ever (and kudos to Steve Wooledge at AsterData for coining the buzz word of the decade- BIG DATA)- a two year old interview.

Aster Data today launched the SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal, a new online community for data scientists and analytic developers. For your convenience, I copied the release below and it can also be found here. Please let me know if you have any questions or if there is anything else I can help you with.

Teradata Accelerates Big Data Analytics with First Collaborative Community for SQL-MapReduce®

New online community for data scientists and analytic developers enables development and sharing of powerful MapReduce analytics

San Carlos, California – Teradata Corporation (NYSE:TDC) today announced the launch of the Aster Data SQL-MapReduce® Developer Portal. This portal is the first collaborative online developer community for SQL-MapReduce analytics, an emerging framework for processing non-relational data and ultra-fast analytics.

“Aster Data continues to deliver on its unique vision for powerful analytics with a rich set of tools to make development of those analytics quick and easy,” said Tasso Argyros, vice president of Aster Data Marketing and Product Management, Teradata Corporation. “This new developer portal builds on Aster Data’s continuing SQL-MapReduce innovation, leveraging the flexibility and power of SQL-MapReduce for analytics that were previously impossible or impractical.”

The developer portal showcases the power and flexibility of Aster Data’s SQL-MapReduce – which uniquely combines standard SQL with the popular MapReduce distributed computing technology for processing big data – by providing a collaborative community for sharing SQL-MapReduce expert insights in addition to sharing SQL-MapReduce analytic functions and sample code. Data scientists, quantitative analysts, and developers can now leverage the experience, knowledge, and best practices of a community of experts to easily harness the power of SQL-MapReduce for big data analytics.

A recent report from IDC Research, “Taking Care of Your Quants: Focusing Data Warehousing Resources on Quantitative Analysts Matters,” has shown that by enabling data scientists with the tools to harness emerging types and sources of data, companies create significant competitive advantage and become leaders in their respective industry.

“The biggest positive differences among leaders and the rest come from the introduction of new types of data,” says Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics Solutions, IDC Research. “This may include either new transactional data sources or new external data feeds of transactional or multi-structured interactional data — the latter may include click stream or other data that is a by-product of social networking.”

Vesset goes on to say, “Aster Data provides a comprehensive platform for analytics and their SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal provides a community for sharing best practices and functions which can have an even greater impact to an organization’s business.”

With this announcement Aster Data extends its industry leadership in delivering the most comprehensive analytic platform for big data analytics — not only capable of processing massive volumes of multi-structured data, but also providing an extensive set of tools and capabilities that make it simple to leverage the power of MapReduce analytics. The Aster Data

SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal brings the power of SQL-MapReduce accessible to data scientists, quantitative analysis, and analytic developers by making it easy to share and collaborate with experts in developing SQL-MapReduce analytics. This portal builds on Aster Data’s history of SQL-MapReduce innovations, including:

Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce enables analytic applications and functions that can deliver faster, deeper insights on terabytes to petabytes of data. These applications are implemented using MapReduce but delivered through standard SQL and business intelligence (BI) tools.

SQL-MapReduce makes it possible for data scientists and developers to empower business analysts with the ability to make informed decisions, incorporating vast amounts of data, regardless of query complexity or data type. Aster Data customers are using SQL-MapReduce for rich analytics including analytic applications for social network analysis, digital marketing optimization, and on-the-fly fraud detection and prevention.

“Collaboration is at the core of our success as one of the leading providers, and pioneers of social software,” said Navdeep Alam, director of Data Architecture at Mzinga. “We are pleased to be one of the early members of The Aster Data SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal, which will allow us the ability to share and leverage insights with others in using big data analytics to attain a deeper understanding of customers’ behavior and create competitive advantage for our business.”

SQL-MapReduce is one of the core capabilities within Aster Data’s flagship product. Aster DatanCluster™ 4.6, the industry’s first massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic platform has an integrated analytics engine that stores and processes both relational and non-relational data at scale. With Aster Data’s unique analytics framework that supports both SQL and
SQL-MapReduce™, customers benefit from rich, new analytics on large data volumes with complex data types. Aster Data analytic functions are embedded within the analytic platform and processed locally with data, which allows for faster data exploration. The SQL-MapReduce framework provides scalable fault-tolerance for new analytics, providing users with superior reliability, regardless of number of users, query size, or data types.

About Aster Data
Aster Data is a market leader in big data analytics, enabling the powerful combination of cost-effective storage and ultra-fast analysis of new sources and types of data. The Aster Data nCluster analytic platform is a massively parallel software solution that embeds MapReduce analytic processing with data stores for deeper insights on new data sources and types to deliver new analytic capabilities with breakthrough performance and scalability. Aster Data’s solution utilizes Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce to parallelize processing of data and applications and deliver rich analytic insights at scale. Companies including Barnes & Noble, Intuit, LinkedIn, Akamai, and MySpace use Aster Data to deliver applications such as digital marketing optimization, social network and relationship analysis, and fraud detection and prevention.

Marry Big Data Analytics to High Performance Computing, and you get the buzzword of this season- High Performance Analytics.

It basically consists of Parallelized code to run in parallel on custom hardware, in -database analytics for speed, and cloud computing /high performance computing environments. On an operational level, it consists of software (as in analytics) partnering with software (as in databases, Map reduce, Hadoop) plus some hardware (HP or IBM mostly). It is considered a high margin , highly profitable, business with small number of deals compared to say desktop licenses.

Teradata is acquiring Aster Data‘s business, including its intellectual property and technology product line, through a merger transaction. Teradata plans to support Aster Data’s customers and integrate its employees immediately upon completion of the acquisition, which is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2011. Teradata acquired an 11 percent ownership interest in Aster Data in September 2010, and has agreed to pay an additional $263 million for the remaining ownership interest, net of debt and other expenses. In addition, through this acquisition, Teradata will obtain approximately $21 million of cash which Aster Data is expected to have on its balance sheet at closing.

Tableau which has been making waves recntly with its great new data visualization tool announced a partner with my old friends at AsterData. Its really cool piece of data vis and very very fast on the desktop- so I can imagine what speed it can help with AsterData’s MPP Row and Column Zingbang AND Parallel Analytical Functions

Tableau and AsterData also share the common Stanfordian connection (but it seems software is divided quite equally between Stanford, Hardvard Dropouts and North Carolina )

It remains to be seen in this announcement how much each company can leverage the partnership or whether it turns like the SAS Institute- AsterData partnership last year or whether it is just to announce connectors in their software to talk to each other.

AsterData remains the guys with the potential but I would be wrong to say MapReduce–SQL is as hot in December 2010 as it was in June 2009- and the elephant in the room would be Hadoop. That and Google’s continued shyness from encashing its principal comptency of handling Big Data (but hush – I signed a NDA with the Google Prediction API– so things maaaay change very rapidly on ahem that cloud)

Disclaimer- AsterData was my internship sponsor during my winter training while at Univ of Tenn.

1) We are back at Decisionstats.com and Decisionstats.wordpress.com will point to that as well. The SEO effects would be interesting and so would be the Instant Pagerank or LinkRank or whatever Coffee/Percolator they use in Cali to index the site.

2) AsterData is no longer a sponsor- but Predictive Analytics Conference is. Welcome PAWS! I have been a blog partner to PAWS ever since it began- and it’s a great marketing fit. Expect to see a lot of exclusive content and interviews from great speakers at PAWS.

3) The Feedblitz newsletter (now at 404 subscribers) is now a weekly subscription to send one big big email rather than lots of email through the week- this is because my blogging frequency is moving up as I collect material for a new book on business analytics that I would probably release in 2011 (if all goes well, touchwood). Linkedin group would be getting a weekly update announcement. If you are connected to Decisionstats on Analyticbridge _ I would soon try to find a way to update the whole post automatically using RSS and Ning.com . or not. Depends.

4) R continues to be a bigger focus. So will SPSS and maybe JMP. Newer softwares or older softwares that change more rapidly would get more coverage. Generally a particular software is covered if it has newer features, or an interesting techie conference, or it gets sued.

5) I will occasionally write a poem or post a video once a week randomly to prove geeks and nerds and analysts can have fun (much more fun actually dont we)

Thanks for reading this. Sept 2010 was the best ever for Decisionstats.com – we crossed 15,000 + visitors and thanks for that again! I promise to bore you less and less as we grow old together on the blog 😉

From the press release, the maker of Map Reduce based BI software gets 30 mill $ as Series C funding. Given the valuation recently by IBM to Netezza, AsterData seems set to cross the Billion Dollar valuation within the next 18-24 months IMO

Aster Data Closes $30 Million Series C Financing

Explosive Growth and Market Leadership Attracts New and Existing Investors

San Carlos, CA – September 22, 2010 – Aster Data, a market leader in big data management and advanced analytics, today announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C round of financing led by both new and existing investors. The company will use the new funding to accelerate growth, scale operations, and expand its global market share in the $20 billion database market – a market that is experiencing rapid growth as a result of both the explosion in data volumes across organizations and the urgent need to deliver a new class of analytics and data-driven applications. The Series C round of funding includes previous investors Sequoia Capital, JAFCO Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Cambrian Ventures, as well as an additional new strategic investor. Also investing in this round is early investor David Cheriton, who previously backed high-growth companies including Google and VMware, and co-founded several successful technology companies.

Today’s Series C funding announcement underscores a year of strong innovation, execution, and overall momentum for the analytic database company. Key milestones include:

Strong sales growth: Since 2008, Aster Data has doubled revenue year-over-year and secured key customers that leverage Aster Data’s platform to address the big data management problem including MySpace, comScore, Barnes & Noble, and Akamai. Like so many organizations today,
Aster Data’s customers are experiencing explosive data growth across their organizations and recognize the need for rich, advanced analytics that give them deeper insights from their data.

Key executive hires: Quentin Gallivan, former CEO of both PivotLink and Postini and EVP of worldwide sales at Verisign, recently joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. In addition, earlier this year, John Calonico, previously at Interwoven, BEA, and Autodesk, joined as Chief Financial Officer; and Nitin Donde, formerly an executive at EMC and 3PAR, joined as Executive Vice President Engineering. The strength and experience of Aster Data’s management team helps further establish a strong operational foundation for growth in 2010 and beyond.

Industry recognition:Aster Data was positioned in the “Visionaries” Quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s

Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant, published 2010 *; was recently named 2011 Tech Pioneer by the World Economic Forum; was named “Company to Watch” in the Information Management category of TechWeb’s Intelligent Enterprise 2010 Editors’ Choice Awards; and was awarded the 2010 San Francisco Business Times Technology and Innovation Award in the Best Product and Services Category.

Product Innovation: Aster Data continues to deliver ground-breaking capabilities to address the big data management and advanced analytics market need. Its recent announcement of
Aster Data nCluster 4.6 includes a column data store, making it the first hybrid row and column MPP DBMS with a unified SQL and MapReduce analytic framework for advanced analytics on large data sets. This year, Aster Data also delivered the most extensive library of pre-packaged MapReduce analytics totaling over 1000 functions, to ease and accelerate delivery of highly advanced analytic applications.

Aster Data’s analytic database, also called a ‘Data-Analytics Server’ is specifically designed to enable organizations to cost effectively store and analyze massive volumes of data. Aster Data leverages the power of commodity, general-purpose hardware, to reduce the cost to scale to support large data volumes and uniquely allows analysis of all data ‘in-database’ enabling richer and faster processing of large data sets. Aster Data’s in-database analytics engine uses the power of MapReduce, a parallel processing framework created by Google.

”The funding we received in our Series C round is a strong endorsement of Aster Data’s market leadership position and the high growth potential of the big data market,” said Quentin Gallivan, Chief Executive Officer, Aster Data. “The Aster Data team has executed exceptionally well to-date and I am excited to have the resources to accelerate the growth of the company as we expand our operations and execute aggressively across all fronts.”